Hi all - I’m new to the forum and am going to start out with something that’s been driving me nuts for about 1.5 years. I’ve experienced this phenomena with my current eyeglasses, which are about 6 months old, and also more defined in my previous pair which I wore for under a year.
As mad as it may sound, I feel as though my glasses are disorienting and disillusioning me. Although there is NO vision distortion, glare, or blur, and I do not get any migranes, headaches, or have any underlying medical issues, I have difficulty focusing and concentrating on things. The best example I can give is with reading in particular (as with all other activities that involve staring at something for long periods of time): I can read, but it’s with a struggle because I become zoned out since I can’t register the text at first glance. Again, although there isn’t explicit blurriness, there is a sort of subtle haziness/cloudiness that impedes the natural flow from one word to another. I feel like too much light (not in its literal sense, like a beam) is entering my eyes and causing convergence issues. It’s important to note that sometimes, when I’m in the pitch dark without my glasses on, my vision is cloudy/foggy – gray spots, like I’m going blind. Also, if I go from indoors to outdoors in the light of day, a bright blue sky will give me pulsating eye pain.
I did make an appointment with my optometrist, but I don’t think she really understood my issue. She wanted to troubleshoot my glasses by reducing the prescription by a quarter (reducing sharpness) to improve my nearsightedness and by stripping the anti-reflective coating as, “some are sensitive to it.” (Although Lenscrafters told me it’s impossible to strip the coating.) Another woman in the office mentioned that I need anti-glare coating, but when she found out I have anti-reflective coating she said they’re the same thing (I always thought they were different!).
Some specifications regarding my eyesight and current glasses:
I have regressive astigmatism in both my eyes. Without glasses, I see even up close in bokeh, and it’ll only get worse.
One eye is -4.75 and the other is -4.00
The lenses are by Lenscrafters and are Hi-Index SV 1.67 Premium AR (Plastic)
The frames are circular such that the lenses are almost, if not completely, flat
IANAOptometrist, but I can relate to the experience quoted above. The eyeglasses prescription only helps with “accommodative insufficiency”, in the case that one or more of your eyes lacks the focusing power for the object in view. Although each eye might be properly accommodated by an artificial lens, the brain might have trouble integrating the signals from both eyes and coordinating their movement as you track text on a page. Such a brain/eye coordination problem is called convergence insufficiency, and there are some studies indicating the effectiveness of vision therapy for its treatment.
Another person chiming in with no useful information, but empathy. I’ve been astigmatic for over twenty years, but began to have these disconcerting feelings when I got a new prescription in 2005. It has improved somewhat over the years, most markedly when I got a different optometrist in 2012.
Is it possible you have higher-order refractive errors? Typical eyeglass astigmatism correction only works on a single axis, with a single power value. But the cornea is in reality a bumpy landscape, and the usual first-order correction may be insufficient.
LASIK surgery will fix these issues perfectly, but I don’t know if you can get similar correction with glasses. Even if you don’t plan on getting LASIK, it might be worth paying for an evaluation to see if they can fully map out your refractive errors.
This wouldn’t explain your issues with indoor/outdoor light, but maybe that’s something different.
For the longest time, I’ve had a hunch that it might be higher-order aberrations. I should’ve introduced the idea when I was at the optometrist’s. LASIK is definitely not an option for me as I prefer glasses. Might prism correction offer similar corrective results with glasses? Maybe I’ll have to see an opthamologist after all…
I haven’t had any blood work done, but I take adequate supplements for B-12.
The phase “higher-order aberrations” will earn you mucho respect at the eye doctor (at least it did for me).
To be honest, I don’t know anything about prism correction. If you had money to burn, you could get LASIK to correct your high-order aberrations, leaving your glasses to correct the base error. Also, there’s no one stopping you from wearing glasses with plain lenses.
You might be able to test for high-order errors yourself. I was able to see them. If I looked at a small, high-contrast image, like a period on a printed page, I could see the image break into several images in semi-random locations (this is without wearing glasses, so that I had otherwise sharp near vision). If I had normal astigmatism, it should have smeared along one axis, but for me the images were reasonably sharp–just randomly distributed.
Good to hear. It’s not hard to get adequate nutrition as a vegan, but there’re more than a few out there that don’t realize you need to take some minor additional steps.
Your posts have reminded me of the problems I’ve had with keratoconus. The late teens are when symptoms tend to show up - I went from 20/20 to 20/200 (uncorrected numbers) in about 18 months around the ages of 18-19. At first, we just thought it was a bad astigmatism.
If you’ve only been seen by an optometrist, they might have overlooked an underlying cause here. An ophthalmologist is definitely recommended.
How bad was your eyesight before you got diagnosed? I understand that early stages of keratoconus have symptoms similar to astigmatism. I don’t have ghosting or double vision, so if it is keratoconus it’s in its mild stages and developing. The question is, would I be able to get a definitive diagnosis so early on with the right equipment if this is my case?
Go to an ophthalmologist. Don’t waste your time at an optometrist. Your symptoms go beyond what an optometrist can diagnose. I won’t bore you with the weird symptoms I experienced or a description of the special glasses I have to have, but even my ophthalmologist was unable to exactly diagnose my problems and had to send me to a neuro-ophthalmologist to figure out what had to be done.
My eyesight was BAD. In fact, the defining moment when I said “OK, I have a problem I need more help with” was when I was doing homework and couldn’t distinguish between - and =. Honestly, they all looked like half a dozen overlapping lines to me, which is one of those key symptoms for keratoconus (Two pictures from NKCF may help illustrate what that looked like: pic 1, pic 2.
I compensated by squinting a lot to reduce the number of extra images so I could often get a single sharp image if I squinted just right. I was actually doing that unconsciously by that point, and it meant that the optometrist couldn’t dial in on one corrective setting that would work.
So I got passed off to the ophthalmologist (thankfully, all in the same visit). The diagnosis was easy for a person who knew what they were looking for. In particular, the topographical maps of the cornea show the cone-like shape pretty easily. The ophthalmologist suspected it within about fifteen minutes of seeing me, and had it pretty much confirmed by the end of an hour or two.
Anyway, I don’t want to make you focus too much on keratoconus. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. The point is that you want to see a specialist. Ophthalmologists specialize in diseases of the eye, while optometrists specialize in correcting vision problems.
